Missouri Williams
“Form Is Back”
Missouri Williams
Novels have become interesting again, and just in time. Readers have finally had enough of the self and its dilemmas, and writers have become less afraid of upsetting them, or of testing their patience. The protagonist of Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour, Mira, is drawn up into a leaf where she undertakes interminable philosophical dialogues with her dead father (who also lives in the leaf), while the narrator of Claire-Louise Bennett’s...
“Here Comes the Break” | On Literary Fiction Today
Missouri Williams
As we were preparing to launch this magazine, we told our first cohort of writers not to pitch us anything about contemporary fiction. We were bored by it, we said — mostly but not entirely tongue-in-cheek. This issue, we’re making an exception. It seems to us that the literary ground has shifted, and the forms and themes considered most exciting just a few years ago are now all but exhausted....
If Only Someone Would Get Aquinas in Here | Fiction
Missouri Williams
The schoolmaster leaned over, a puff of black robes, and read to them from the dusty book on the desk in front of him. Today the world was weaker: a milky sun hung in the sky and wanted nothing to do with the earth. What seeped through the cracked glass of the window behind him was a thin, soupy light that washed the schoolroom a bleached yellow, and this meant...
